Lavan’

Update: 25 October 2019 Along the way, certain people have been particularly influential in terms of career progression and/or personal development; so it’s appropriate to acknowledge as many as I can remember. So here goes… Close friends and relatives My parents Ted & Betty Rice, of course. My uncle George Chandler who, playing guitar in a nightclub jazz trio and building a yacht to sail around the world, epitomised ‘cool’ to an impressionable 10-year-old. Rita Smith, always the aunty I was closest to and her daughters Norma (now Norma Klunder) and Maureen (now Maureen Williams) who embodied the mysteries of ‘teenage girl’ to their younger, only child male cousin. Ex-wives Linda Rice and Jane Rice inevitably have left their marks on me – as have ex-fiancees Jennie Beasty and Val Horsfall. Liz Olson was an American and a fellow Jefferson Starship fan who flew across the Atlantic to challenge some of my precepts! My 2 oldest friends, Chris Scurrah and David Burnby have been hugely influential in very different ways – Chris for inspiring me and supporting me to become a musician and Dave for supporting me in applying the Gravesian approach to real life. My stepdaughter Viki Harris has sometimes forced me to think about things differently… Read More

PART 2 Work And Spiral Dynamics integral Prior to the Beck & Cowan workshops, career-wise I was very much driven by BLUE. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, given the household I grew up in, once I had gotten over the peak of my hippie rebellion, unconsciously perhaps my YELLOW taking in the consequences of all that GREEN-liberated RED indulgence – I settled easily into BLUE ways of thinking and ended up working as a consultant on quality standards like ISO 9000 and Investors in People. Unfortunately I very much approached this work, not from the angle of business improvement but from the perspective that what was required was rigid conformity to idealised models of business performance. My precision and attention to detail made me effective in getting organisations to meet their desired standard but I did little or nothing to improve business performance. One printing house in London threw out the project because I was tying them up in paperwork. That was typical of BLUE’s emphasis on form over function. That motivation was taken to the extremes of punishing the sinner when, during a procedural audit in a care home, I castigated a nurse for not signing the care plan in the right place.… Read More

Personal Reflections On The Influence Of SDi ‘Lives on the Spiral’ is one of 2 contributions commissioned from me by Tom Christensen for his compendium, Developmental Innovation: Emerging Worldviews and Individual Learning (Integral Publishers, August 2015). Originally the work was to be entitled ‘SDi Applied’ as Tom wanted to present chapters which reflected Don Beck’s ongoing development of Clare W Graves’ research. Accordingly, Tom wanted the primary term used to be SDi rather than Spiral Dynamics or the ‘Graves Model’. Although I readily acknowledge my debt to Don Beck (and Chris Cowan, for that matter), I have never operated under the SDi umbrella, preferring to use terms such as the Gravesian approach. To maintain the integrity of the piece as published, I have retained the SDi terminology. However, readers should know that effectively I mean ‘Gravesian’. Tom ended up with so many strong contributions – including from the likes of Said E Dawlabani, Elza Maalouf, Barbara N Brown and Fred Krawchuk – that he and Integral Publishers split the material into 2 volumes: the first on Systems Change and the second on Individual Learning. Both my contributions are in the second book. I’ve had an interest in Psychology since my first year at… Read More

Change…and New Experiences! 1988-1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 21st Century Group HemsMESH Humber MeshWORKS Humberside MESH Network January-March: Delivered Understanding Yourself & Others – an Introduction to Psychology for Rossett’s Extended Schools Adult Education Programme. Commentary: While, obviously, I had a long track record of delivering successful workshop programmes for adults, this was my first ‘night school’ course. The initial momentum for such a course and the design of the course had come from one-time Guiseley Psychology teacher Marc Smith. However, Marc had moved on and Rossett’s Extended Schools coordinator Malcolm Howe asked me to take it over. To some extent, I was lucky. Firstly, Malcolm gave me pretty much a free hand to alter Marc’s course to suit my own preferences…so I was able to include sessions on the Gravesian approach and Hans J Eysenck’s Dimensions of Temperament which enabled me to be truly passionate about the material. Secondly, by using an NLP-based approach to getting the workshop participants engaged both with the material and with each other, those on on… Read More

The Making of a ‘Change Engineer’… 1988-1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 21st Century Group HemsMESH Humber MeshWORKS Humberside MESH Network February: Persuaded Business Link Wakefield & District and Wakefield College that the Management Development Forum agenda and resources should be incorporated within the Business Growth Forum. Commentary: The details of ISO 9000 and Investors in People demonstrated clearly how much overlap there was in the aims of the 2 groups. Since there was a considerable commonality of membership, combined with frustration at the agencies’ duplication of effort and resources, it made sense – to me and to the member businesses – that the 2 groups be merged. This was the beginning of a new alliance at operational level between the 2 agencies and a key factor in the development of the BGF. March: The Business Growth Forum profile raised considerably by hosting joint workshop on Kaizen with RHP Bearings (Knottingley, West Yorks). Commentary: RHP were one of the larger engineering firms in the District and one of the most advanced in terms of… Read More

Tribute to a ‘World-beating’ Business Network written with input from Ian Lavan Updated: 12 December 2007 1988-1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 21st Century Group HemsMESH Humber MeshWORKS Humberside MESH Network The 21st Century Group (1997-2001) was a pioneering network of SMEs (small-medium-sized enterprises) which attracted national – and even international – attention. When I joined Business Link Wakefield & District in January 1997, part of my remit was to establish a network of manufacturing and engineering SMEs. Previous attempts to establish such a network had been abandoned, usually within 6 months, in face of massive indifference from local businesses. In general, local response to training and consultancy initiatives promoted through the Business Link, Wakefield College, Mid-Yorkshire Chamber of Commerce & Enterprise and other institutions was decidedly poor. (If more than a handful of business people turned up to an event, it was considered an unequivocal success!) Yet annual surveys by Wakefield Training & Enterprise Council had revealed repeatedly a lack of innovation, competitiveness and ‘best practice’ amongst businesses in the District.… Read More

A Tribute to a Pioneering MeshWORK Project written with input from Christopher Cooke inspired by an original report by Matthew Kalman Updated: 8 October 2017 1988-1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 21st Century Group HemsMESH Humber MeshWORKS Humberside MESH Network ‘HemsMESH’ was the first major Gravesian-oriented project in the UK. Technically, it was a ‘pilot’ – which meant in reality things were being tried out as the project went along – which also meant that it was an awesome learning experience for all involved! There was never any official ‘follow-on – but the project was far from a failure as all the key figures in the project went onto to further work with the principles involved. Indeed, for many years afterwards Christopher ‘Cookie’ Cooke, the project leader, carried out work with both individuals and agencies that were involved in it. It also brought to a climax a remarkable 3 years which had seen Wakefield Training & Enterprise Council and Business Link Wakefield & District, 2 organisations rooted in BLUE bureaucracy, not only embrace… Read More

Updated: 28 May 2016 The Neurological Levels concept was developed by Robert Dilts (1990) taking much of his inspiration from the work of Gregory Bateson (leading anthropologist, philosopher and seminal figure in the early development of NLP – particularly his Logical Levels of Learning construct (1972). For this model of abstracted levels of what we learn and how it affects us, Bateson himself drew on the Logical Typing of mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell (1910). Taking his cue from Bateson, Dilts conceived a hierarchy of levels the mind uses to order its relationship with the world. Dilts linked these ‘Logical Levels’ to neurological functions and structure of the brain. Thus, Neurological Levels! While the supposed ‘logicality’ of the model has been attacked and the way Dilts’ has used neurology is sometimes open to question – see Peter McNab’s Article, Aligning Neurological Levels -a Reassessment (1999) – almost everyone who has worked with the model testifies to its power to describe what we might call Nominal Level Adaptation. (See: Integrated SocioPsychology.) In other words, the match of Identity – and the Values & Beliefs which flow from Identity – to the Environment in which we find ourselves. The key to a healthy psyche (selfplex),… Read More

Spiral Dynamics co-developer Chris Cowan passed away on 15 July at the Serenity House hospice in Santa Barbara, California. He was diagnosed with aggressive and incurable pancreatic cancer in June after returning from delivering a training programme in Italy with his personal and business partner Natasha Todorovic. I hadn’t seen Chris since December 1998. We hadn’t had a meaningful discourse since 2009 and hadn’t had any communication at all since the end of 2012 (exchange of Christmas best wishes). So it’s a measure of the man and his influence on my life that I feel compelled to write something about him at his passing. Put quite simply, the Spiral Dynamics (SD-1 certification) workshops that Chris and his then-business partner Don Beck staged with the Business Link in Wakefield in March-April 1998 were a major turning point in my life. I was acutely stressed at the time in both my work and relationship situations, unable to see how to resolve either one or even to understand what was happening to me. In terms of the process of change, I was in the Gamma Trap in both. Through the understanding Spiral Dynamics gave me, I was able to resolve both situations and, apart from… Read More

Well, no, I didn’t actually get to meet Zulfi Hussain to say ‘Hello’ – but we were in the same room and we made eye contact and he will know who I am because I was the guy going on about the importance of values in understanding diversity. (“Hey, Zulfi, that was me…Keith Rice!”) If I sound unusually humble and maybe even a little subservient – fawning, even! – not at all my usual pompous and arrogant self…well, I spent some time yesterday with one of those rare people who just make a difference in the world. Almost just by who they are. You just know, being with them, that you are in the presence of someone special – very special indeed! I can probably number on one hand the people who have made me feel that way previously: Spiral Dynamics co-developers Don Beck & Chris Cowan, Meta-States developer L Michael Hall, ‘Inner Child’ specialist Penny Parks, maybe former Hidden Resources head honcho John Lavan…. The occasion was a get-together yesterday morning of some of the speakers and committed participants in the ruins of the 6th annual Yorkshire Leadership Conference. The Conference, so successful in previous years, had… Read More